Raging Against “Them”

In very un-Icelandic fashion, last week protestors in Athens tried to blow up a downtown courthouse. Over a year after the Hellenic meltdown, the Greek newspapers still reflect the popular fury — protests, strikes, senseless violence — at the mandatory cutbacks, the public sector layoffs, and the high-interest needed to attract investors to shaky Greek bonds. And yet amid the furor, 60% of the public still polls in favor of the European Union. How are we to diagnose the drowning non-swimmer who eagerly grasps — and yet hates — the life preserver?

A bit of story-telling: When I lived in Greece in the 1970s, it was a relatively poor country. The road system was deplorable, the airport at Athens was little more than an insulated warehouse. I usually stayed in hotels with bathrooms down the hall. A bus trip of about 200 miles translated into about a six hour marathon. The buses were often of eastern European make and spewed black smoke into the Athenian air whose toxic bite could devour marble. Rail travel was nightmarish (biking was quicker). There was no bridge across the Gulf of Corinth. The Athens “subway” was little more than a 19th-century electric carriage.

Greeks’ second homes were one bedroom village affairs. It was rare to see a Mercedes in Athens. I knew one Greek who had a swimming pool. Getting off an island ferry boat usually meant meeting a swarm of older ladies trying to hawk you their extra bedroom for rent.

You get the picture:1970s Greece reflected a small southern Balkan population wedded to a siesta lifestyle, on a rocky peninsula in which there was little wealth other than tourism: a poorly developed agriculture, some shipping, and remittances from Greek expatriates in the United States and Germany.

Fast forward to the post-Olympics Greece: five star hotels, 20,000 plus private swimming pools (most of them unreported for tax purposes), half the work force ensconced in cushy government or government-related jobs, Attica dotted with Riviera-like second homes, BMWs more common than Mercedeses, billions of Euros worth of new highways, bridges, airport, and subway system.

In other words, somehow a country without a manufacturing base, poor productivity, a small population, an inefficient statist economy, and bloated public sector suddenly went from near third world status to a standard of living not that much different from a Munich or Amsterdam. How? Why?

Well, we know the answer: northern European cash — borrowed, given, or swindled. The radical new affluence in part was justified by the fact Germans and Scandinavians wanted good infrastructure and facilities when they went on their annual summer Greek vacations — along with pan-EU pipedreams and fraudulent Greek bookkeeping that disguised massive debt.

Now? Oz is over with, and the Greeks are furious at “them”. Furious in the sense that everyone must be blamed except themselves. So they protest and demonstrate that they do not wish to stop borrowing money to sustain a lifestyle that they have not earned — but do not wish to sever ties either with their EU beneficiaries and go it alone as in the 1970s. So they rage against reality.

California Got What It Wanted

The same is true of California. Our elites liked the idea of stopping new gas and oil extraction, shutting down the nuclear power industry, freezing state east-west freeways, strangling the mining and timber industries, cutting off water to agriculture in the Central Valley, diverting revenues from fixing roads and bridges to redistributive entitlements, and praising the new multicultural state that would welcome in half the nation’s 11-15 million illegal aliens. Better yet, the red-state-minded “they” (the nasty upper one-percent who stole from the rest of us due to their grasping but superfluous businesses) began to leave at the rate of 3,000 a week, ensuring the state a Senator Barbara Boxer into her nineties.

Yes, we are proud that we have changed the attitude, lifestyle, and demography of the state, made it “green”, and have the highest paid public employee and the most generous welfare system — and do not have to soil our hands with nasty things like farming, oil production, or nuclear power. And now we are broke. Our infrastructure is crumbling and an embarrassment. My environs is known as “Zimbabwe” or “Appalachia” for its new third-world look that followed from the highest unemployment and lowest per capita income in the nation. Again, thanks to Mississippi our schools are not last in reading and math. So, of course, like the Greeks, we are mad at somebody other than ourselves. Californians are desperate for a “them” fix. But who is them? “Them” either left, is leaving, or has been shut down.

Consumers are furious at spiking gas and food prices, and the collapse of state revenues. The illegal alien cadre is furious that there are cutbacks in their entitlements. The Latino community says that it cannot support anyone who wants to close the border and opposes amnesty. The public employees are furious in Greek-like fashion at the thought of cuts to pensions and lay-offs. The professors and UC administrators are either suing the state or turning on each other. Where are a few hundred Bill Gates and Warren Buffets who would gladly pay more in taxes for the rest of us from their ill-gotten gains?

The Statist Religion

What strikes me is not that leftism does not work, but that when it is indulged and doesn’t work, its beneficiaries scream at the unfairness of it all — in the fashion that a theorist who claimed 2 plus 2 equals 5 blames the construct of mathematics that his equation is not true. Why don’t Germans just give Greeks the hundreds of billions of Euros that they “owe” them?

The green lobby got all it wanted — subsidies, insider dealers, fame, money, influence. And then came Climategate, the multimillionaire Al Gore personal and professional meltdown, the coldest, iciest, and snowiest winters in memory, all the false warnings about record hurricanes and tsunamis becoming the new norm, the Orwellian metamorphosizing nomenclature (global warming begat climate change that is now begetting “climate chaos”).

Gorism is becoming a permanent fixture of late night comedians. When theNew York Times keeps publishing op-eds about how record cold proves record global warming, the world wonders what would record heat prove?

But whom to blame? The bad earth that is not boiling this winter? Right-wing zealots who cannot comprehend that very cold proves very hot. Red-state yahoos that don’t understand the brilliance of cap and trade? Broke governments that did not subsidize enough green power, green farming, and green energy?

The New Liberal Age

By January 2009, I was reading brilliant new books promising an end to conservatism, a new 50-year-old liberal ascendency, the final triumph of John Maynard Keynes, and of course the omnipresent “god” Barack Obama. By May 2009 we were lectured that the nascent tea-party was an Astroturf fake movement, then a racist dangerous movement with Nazi undertones, and then a splinter nihilist know-nothing movement without political consequences.

By November 2011 all the above vanished in a blink. Furor followed from the Left that Obama was not a Great Stone Face savior, that the Tea Party was all too real, that the conservatives were back, and that liberalism had suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1938. How can all this be? Whom to blame?

Inconvenient Truths

Yet why not carry on with the progressive agenda? Would not the Greeks be happier if the Germans said, “Sorry, we won’t loan you anything at any interest rate, so please by all means riot all you wish”?

Would Californians be happier if we let in, say, 10 million more illegal aliens, shut down east-side San Joaquin Valley water deliveries as well to save far more fishlets than just the smelt? Are not we still discriminating against transsexual and transgendered in the military? Why is there not redress for underrepresented gay officers? Do we not have a diversity program for gays in the manner the Pentagon has outlined? Why are not these legitimate questions?

Cannot liberals press on with their dream and insist on amnesty, go for single-payer healthcare, lobby for a 50% income tax rate on higher incomes? If spring is delayed by frost and snow this year into June or July would that even more so prove the case for global warming? Will Al Gore make another film, “A Really Really Inconvenient Truth”?

In short, there is no “them” who wrecked Greece, or ruined California, subverted the climate change movement, sidetracked a half century of liberalism to come, or discredited mega-deficit spending.

“Them” you see is simply a shorthand for “I got what I wanted, and I am mad at someone or something for not allowing the world to become what I think it should have been.”

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About Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture.

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